Chapter Eight
Chapter
Eight
Jailbreaks are nothing like in the movies. Especially when instead of a jail, you’re in a performing arts high school and the one security guard on staff is subbing for your chemistry teacher who got food poisoning from a hot dog cart.
Danny had only ever cut class once in his life, and it was so he could audition for a school where he’d never need to cut class again. So it caught him off guard when Christian suggested they cut class that morning.
“Psst,” the girl behind Danny whispered, poking him in the shoulder and handing him a triangle of folded looseleaf.
The only notes Danny had ever gotten passed at St. Pete’s were drawings of dicks, so he hesitated before opening this one.
He would have crumpled it right up and crammed it into his pocket if it hadn’t been for the two words written in big bubble letters: “TOUGH GUY.” Inside, Danny found a handwritten note from Christian Geronimo detailing the plans for his Great Escape, Part 2.
4th period get someone to sign ur name on the attendance sheet and take the C stairs to the lobby I’ll meet you in the theater and we can sneak out through the back!!
Danny looked suspiciously across the room to Christian, who flashed him a chipped-tooth grin and a hopeful thumbs-up. Danny let out a sigh before mouthing a reluctant “Okay.”
Getting someone to sign Danny’s name on the attendance sheet was almost too easy.
At LaGuardia, this practice was as common as pencil shavings, especially when a class had a sub.
His chemistry teacher, Mr. Greene, had been out sick and the school’s Rent-a-Cop, Mr.—not “Officer”—Jenkins, had scrapped all lesson plans in favor of wheeling in the TV/VCR and putting on a VHS of Outbreak that he’d taped on cable, “because, y’know, science. ”
The fourth-period bell rang and Danny scrambled to the stairwell, not even stopping at his locker to grab his jean jacket.
He followed Christian’s instructions and took the stairs to the lobby, slipping into the auditorium, a place he’d somehow never actually seen.
Despite being in a hurry and despite Christian’s warnings and despite the fact that his friends were waiting, Danny couldn’t help but pause and take in the space.
At St. Pete’s, their auditorium doubled as a gym, which doubled as a cafeteria, and they rolled out the plastic chairs only for assemblies or graduations.
But the picture Danny saw as he entered the theater matched the one in his head from every time an overture played on one of his tapes.
The room was completely dark, except for a single industrial lamp parked center stage, but even in the dim light, Danny could tell this place was something to behold.
The stage was bigger than a soccer field and dressed in a red velvet curtain that was as tall as Skull Mountain at Six Flags.
Danny snuck down the aisle and up the stairs leading to the stage, the soles of his sneakers almost crackling as they touched the sacred surface for the first time.
He made his way to the center of the stage and peered out into the immense darkness—at the spotlights aimed directly at him and the rows of scarlet chairs that seemed to go on forever.
It was funny. In that moment, he felt both incredibly small and like he was perhaps standing at the very center of the universe.
This is what it must be like, Danny thought. Looking out from the other side.
“Echo,” he called out softly, unable to help himself, his tiny voice dissipating into the air like foggy breath on a cold day.
“ECHO-O-O-O,” he shouted louder, his voice bouncing off the back walls of the theater, coaxing a smile onto his face.
“ ‘To be…or not to be!’ ” he called out in his best approximation of a Shakespearean voice.
“ ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,’ ” he shouted in a proper British accent, mimicking Eliza Doolittle’s famous line from My Fair Lady.
Well, Danny considered, staring out at the audience. Just in case this is my only shot.
He took in a deep breath, savoring the musty scent of old wood and fabric.
“ ‘There’s a somebody I’m longing to see…’ ”
He sang softly at first, testing out the space like how one might test the strength of a frozen pond before skating on it.
“I hope that he turns out to be
Someone who’ll watch over me.”
The song was one of his Ma’s favorites. Ella Fitzgerald. He could picture her standing over the stove, stirring and humming quietly to herself.
Danny took in another, deeper, breath.
“I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood
I know I could always be good.”
He closed his eyes, his lips shaping the lyrics with precision and care.
As he sang, the theater seemed to come alive around him as if the walls themselves were breathing, responding to the sound of his voice.
And suddenly, he was no longer in a dark, empty theater.
He could feel the warmth of a spotlight on his face and the once-empty seats were filled now with elegantly dressed men and women sitting in long gowns and silk gloves and top hats and tiny binoculars on a stick, all gazing up at him in awe.
“Someone to waaaatch…,” he sang, tilting his head back and allowing his voice to soar, feeling the resonance fill every corner of the auditorium and wrapping itself around every audience member like a fur stole.
“…Over me.”
Danny let his final words trail off, listening as his voice faded into nothingness. The silence was interrupted by the sound of a pair of hands clapping, jolting Danny out of the packed theater and back into the body of a startled high school student.
“Bravo! Bravissimo!” Christian called from the back of the auditorium.
“Aw, fuck me!” Danny blurted, covering his face with his palm, his skin sizzling underneath.
Christian trotted down the aisle, still clapping. “Encore! Encore!”
“Oh my God, shutupshutupshutup!” Danny despaired. “How long have you been in here?”
“Since before you arrived,” Christian said, shrugging and clopping up the stairs. “I didn’t wanna interrupt the moment.”
“Oh man, I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m just gonna…yeah…well…” Danny scrunched his eyes shut, attempting to melt into the wooden floorboards.
“Oh stop! Don’t be embarrassed!” Christian said, walking up and slapping Danny on the back. “You sing like a goddamn canary!”
“I’m serious, man. Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen—”
“Shit, if I could sing like that, I swear to gawd, you bitches would never hear the end of it,” Christian steamrolled over Danny’s attempt at self-deprecation. “Sheet music would have been a performance-enhancing drug.”
Danny shook his head, not sure what to say.
On one hand, he was humiliated. But he could also feel a tiny bit of pride peeking through.
Christian was someone who had opinions on everything, and not all of them were positive.
And even though Danny was sure part of him was just being polite, he could sense that there was maybe a bit of genuine admiration in his words as well.
“Well,” Danny muttered, tugging at the bottom of his shirt. “Thanks.”
“Anytime,” Christian said, winking.
“So…” Danny shuffled his feet. “We should probably get going, right? Where’s the exit?”
“Right this way, Miss LuPone,” Christian said, curtsying dramatically and gesturing toward the wings.
The black-painted door opened up to the clamor of Sixty-Fifth Street and an achingly beautiful autumn day.
They sprinted across the street to the high marble walls of Lincoln Center where Nina, Astoria, and Orion were waiting by the fountain, looking like a police lineup for a gang that had robbed the Salvation Army.
“Yo!” Christian called to his friends. “Look who I brought.”
“Oh,” Astoria said, crossing her arms, looking annoyed. “Hey.”
Orion nodded solemnly.
“He-ey, Danny,” Nina said nervously. Probably worried I’ll blow up on her like I did with Ms. Mellon, Danny thought. Creep.
“Hey, gang!” Danny chirped, his voice high and cheerful with forced excitement, desperate to smooth over the obvious tension. “Where to?”
They all looked sharply at each other.
“Well, you’re not gonna like it, but you also don’t have a choice,” Christian said.
“We’re going to Central Park,” Astoria said dryly. “Sheep Meadow, to be exact.”
Everyone, including Orion with his pink-tinted star-shaped glasses, visibly braced for Danny’s inevitable rejection of their plan.
“Okay,” Danny said.
Given everything he’d seen in his first few weeks in the City—and Danny had come to think of it as “the City,” distinct and above “the city” where he’d lived his whole life—a park no longer seemed to loom quite as large.
“For real?” Nina balked. “Christian said last time you had like a major—”
“Shhshhshhshh,” Christian swatted. “Doesn’t matter. He said it’s fine, it’s fine. Follow me.”
“Two peanuts were walking through Central Park and one was a-salted.”
It was one of the first jokes that Danny had learned as a kid.
For his entire life, his father had told him that this stretch of Upper Manhattan was the most dangerous 843 acres in America: that dope-crazed hippies lived under the sandstone bridges, ready to slash your ankles as you crossed overhead; that drinking fountains were laced with acid and you had to check the lawn for hypodermic needles; that perverts would lure young boys into thickets and infect them with incurable diseases; that gangbangers would ride by on stolen bikes, snatching purses and grabbing at skirts so fast, your mother or Nonni wouldn’t even know what hit them.
When Danny found a park with trees and ponds and flowers and children playing barefoot, he wondered what else his father had lied to him about.